Romney’s Debate Win Doesn’t Make It 1980 Again

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Mitt Romney’s winning performance in
last week’s presidential debate has reinforced his campaign’s
belief that this election parallels the one in 1980: In troubled
times, Republicans inevitably defeat an unpopular Democratic
president.

While Romney gets to hit the reset button after President
Barack Obama’s desultory display, he’d better not count on the
1980 analogy. Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter wasn’t
inevitable; it was earned, with some help from outsiders. The
environment was far less hospitable for the incumbent president
in 1980 than it is today.

Looking at the three major elements of any presidential
contest -- the candidate and campaign, the conditions, and the
electorate -- underscores the Republican’s challenge in
replicating the Reagan victory this year.

Obama is a better candidate than Carter. Romney is no
Reagan.

To be sure, the architects of the Carter campaign in 1980
were a little better than their Reagan counterparts and probably
better than the Obama team this year. And candidate Reagan made
some major mistakes, such as warning about the environmental
damage caused by trees. He dispatched his running mate, George
H.W. Bush, to China to burnish the ticket’s foreign-policy
credentials even as he expressed support for Taiwan, resulting
in a debacle reminiscent of Romney’s foreign travels last
summer.

Reagan’s Eloquence

Yet, at crucial times, Reagan also was capable of inspiring
moments; his eloquent convention speech gave him a big advantage
in polls, in sharp contrast with Romney’s address this year. In
the close of his debate with the president, after being on the
defensive for much of the evening, Reagan blew Carter away.

And Carter matched Reagan mistake for mistake. Less than
four weeks before the election, the Democrats had to arrange a
special TV interview during which the president promised to cut
out his mean rhetoric. After facing Senator Edward M. Kennedy in
a bruising nomination battle, he was leading a divided party.

For all the talk about a lousy economic environment this
year, things were much worse 32 years ago. The jobless rate had
remained at the 7.5 percent level that Carter inherited
(slightly lower than the 7.8 percent today). For the past three
years, inflation and interest rates have been remarkably low and
stable. Under Carter, the inflation rate more than doubled to
12.6 percent. A metric known as the Misery Index, the
combination of inflation and unemployment, topped 20 percent on
Election Day 1980. Today, it’s 9.5 percent.

The interest-rate picture was worse. Home-mortgage rates
almost doubled and the federal-funds rate tripled. The month
before the election, Carter had a job-approval rating of 37
percent; Obama’s hovers around 50 percent.

Republicans now are trying to make the case that the
tragedy in Libya, where lax security may have contributed to the
assassination of the U.S. ambassador, underscores Obama’s
weakness on national security. That’s a tough sell against the
commander in chief who ordered the successful mission to kill
Osama bin Laden.

And it doesn’t begin to compare with the charges made
against Carter in 1980, when 52 Americans were held hostage for
444 days after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. ABC
News broadcast an award-winning nightly program on the crisis
entitled “America Held Hostage: Day XXX.” The charge that
America was impotent resonated in those Cold War days.

Shifting Demographics

The demographics of the electorate also have shifted
dramatically. In the Reagan victory, 88 percent of voters were
white. In November, that number will be closer to 74 percent,
and the president will capture about 80 percent of the nonwhite
vote. Young voters split in the earlier election; this year,
turned off by what they see as the Republican Party’s
intolerance, they will vote decisively for Obama.

Even with these advantages, Reagan struggled during the
fall. Three weeks before the election, his pollster, Richard
Wirthlin, in a private campaign survey, found Carter ahead by
two points.

It was Reagan’s command at the end of the debate, his
strength as a closing candidate and, and perhaps most of all,
the Iranians’ pulling out the rug from under Carter on the eve
of the election that settled the contest.

Reagan trimmed some of his harder-line conservative
positions in the general election. He altered his opposition to
federal aid for New York City and Chrysler Corp. and enlisted
establishment Republicans such as Henry Kissinger and Alan
Greenspan.

These changes pale in comparison to Romney’s complete
transformation since he first decided to run for president six
years ago: he turned from a supporter of immigration reform to
an immigration basher; from a champion of stem-cell research to
an opponent, and most recently, he has moved away from the
position on tax cuts he espoused in the primaries.

In the end, Reagan persuaded voters he had core principles
and an ability to lead the country. One minor triumph in a
debate is only a small step if Romney is to accomplish a similar
journey.

(Albert R. Hunt is Washington editor at Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are his own.)